I'm currently working in three fourth grade classrooms, modeling the writing process, writing crafts, conventions, and instilling the pure LOVE for writing narratives and expository essays. We had a GREAT day incorporating our storytelling skills during the prewriting stage of our expository essays. The joy of human existance is the ability to share one's ideas, wonders, creations, frustrations, and accomplishments. As kindergarten teachers, we had show and tell. The act of writing is no different. Prewriting is the perfect time to have small groups of students share out their ideas for their essay, including little vinettes of each idea. It's amazing to walk around and hear all of the connections made by the mere fact of a peer stating an experience they once had. Wow, at times during this sharing session, an entire group gets riled up because of a shared experience. They've made spontaneous connections to what one child talked about. That puts a smile on my face. As facilitator, I just have to gently remind these kids to add what they are so excited about onto their own graphic organizer.

Prewriting Activity:

1. The students were given the prompt for their expository essay:Write about a place that is important to you. Explain why this place is important using details.2. We reviewed how important our prewriting ideas are to get down on paper before writing our rough draft so I simply shared on the white board how to make a divide your paper up into 4 quadrants (I drew a vertical line down the middle of the paper and a horizontal line across the paper)3. The four quadrants were labelled: Rooms in home, far away places, secret places, close by places4. I modeled what came from my own background experiences (my schema) For example, under "Rooms in home" I wrote Kitchen - baked cooked/brownies with Mom. For "Close by places" I wrote camping at Canyon Lake5. The kids then were asked to do the same - quiet time - no sharing yet. This is the time for everyone to get into their own world to write down what they know personally - no outside influence yet.6. Best part - I selected a leader for each group of 4 or 5 students to begin sharing out his/her ideas, including vinettes to go with their ideas. The leader would then choose another person in their group to share out. 7. When connections were made, I reminded the students to write down any additional ideas that came from other students that you too could write about.8. Hard choices - The students were then asked to star the one favorite place that they knew they could write about in detail adding at least 2 - 3 reasons or major details on why this was a favorite place.